Thursday, October 29, 2009

For a while now, I've wanted to make candied crabapples because everything is cuter in miniature! But in years past, I hadn't been able to find a good, reliable, and reasonably priced (and I say reasonably priced because this is important to a grad student who has a kitchen/baking obsession) source for crabapples. Until I happened to waltz into Whole Foods this past weekend and lo and behold-- a stand of the cutest little apples ever. :-D Yippee!

I've also been a little obsessed with the spooky candied apples that I first saw on mattbites.com a few weeks ago and have since been popping up everywhere. I mean, the black is just downright creepy.

(poor red apple...)

Candied apples are super simple and easy to make. And, crabapples make for the perfect candied apples. Not only are they small so that you can actually manage to sink your teeth into them but also they come with a built in stem, so no need to go about forcing twigs or sticks into your apple cores.

Oh--and one more thing. Here's what I did with the leftover melted sugar:

Black candy corn lollipops! :-D Can you say, sugar high?

Anyways, I have to apologize for the terseness of this post! I've been extremely swamped at work so blogging and baking have been relegated to very late-night tasks. Tomorrow will be a whole day of more Halloween party-prep, so I'll see everyone back here tomorrow night for another round of Halloween treats!

Read on for recipe...Red and black candied crabapplesmakes ~25 crabapples

1. Wash and dry the crabapples. Set aside. Prepare an ice bath in a large bowl.
2. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, melt sugar, corn syrup, water, and a few drops of red food coloring over medium to medium-high heat. Stir until the mixture comes to a boil and then stop stirring.
3. Boil syrup until it reaches between 300 and 310 degrees F. Do not overcook! or your sugar will burn.
4. Once the syrup has reached 300-310 degrees F, remove the saucepan from stovetop and dunk briefly in the prepared ice bath to stop cooking.
5. Dip some of the crabapples in the sugar syrup and place them on silpats or pieces of parchment paper to dry.
6. Return the remaining syrup to the stove (you may want to add a little bit of sugar and water if you're running low) and add a few drops of black food coloring. The red food coloring from the previous batch will help turn the black food coloring darker.
7. Cook syrup again until 300-310 degrees F and dunk once again briefly in ice bath.
8. Dip the remainder of the crabapples in the black syrup and let dry on silpats.

If you have some leftover melted sugar, you can use it to make lollipops.

1. On a silpat or parchment paper, pour a circle of the melted sugar syrup.
2. Quickly press a lollipop stick down into the center of the syrup and add desired candies (candy corn, licorice, m&m's, or nuts, if you want to be all healthy about it).
3. Pour a little bit more syrup on top of the stick to hide it from view, if desired.
4. Let the lollipops dry.